Photographer’s Dog Has Some Amazing Photos

Pets are excellent subjects if you can get them to sit still long enough for a quick snap. The results are even better if they cooperate long enough to be decorated with props and such. How cute is this golden retriever named Champ? Candice Sedighan, the owner and photographer, “wanted to take photos and show people things they’ve never seen before” such as Champ in Dressed to impress or Underwater.

“I really like to capture the true essence with dogs, which is that they’re always so happy,” she says. “The time Champ and I spend together, he’s just always beaming with happiness and you can really see that through my photos.”

Champ was a gift from her dad. At the time, he was only 9 weeks old. She describes him as a “Marley and Me’ type of puppy”, which is interesting because he looks so well-behaved in these pictures!

“He ate a lot of rugs, thousands of dollars of damage. He had a lot of excess energy and I tried to channel that into training instead,” Candice admits. I feel her pain. I’ve lost a few pairs of shoes to retrievers myself.

She started taking pictures of Champ for personal memories at first, but was encouraged to join Flickr after receiving positive feedback.

“Flickr helped me take photography to the next level,” says Candice. “I’ve been able to get a lot of feedback from other photographers as well as dog lovers.”

She joined one of the Flickr groups called “52 Weeks for Dogs”. Members upload one photo per week for a whole year of their dogs. It was through this group that she decided to pursue photography more seriously.

“My favorite photo of Champ is the one with the butterfly on his nose,” Candice explains. “I know a lot of people just automatically assume maybe that I photoshopped the butterfly in, but I actually went over to a butterfly farm and bought butterflies.”

In the last seven years, Candice has taken almost 20,000 pictures of Champ. She has won around $5,000 in contests, some of which were for Hallmark.

I am a freelance photographer who is no stranger to smudged lenses, long hours in front of the computer, heavy camera bags (and the back aches that ensued) and missing lens caps. If you know what I'm talking about, you probably have as much love and passion for photography as I do.